When a user conducts a purchase transaction with a credit card or a debit card, details of that transaction are forwarded to the consumer at some point in time. The consumer may be notified of the transaction in his monthly credit or debit card statement, and/or may be notified of the transaction by a transaction notification alert that is sent to the consumer's phone. The transaction notification may include a merchant identifier, the date on which the transaction occurred, and the amount of the purchase.
In some cases, the merchant identifier that is sent to the consumer is not clear and the consumer may not recognize the particular merchant identifier in the notification alert or in his monthly statement. For example, in some cases, the actual merchant that conducted the transaction may operate under a tradename that is different than the real name of the merchant. When the consumer does not recognize the name of the merchant in the transaction notification alert or in the monthly statement, the consumer may get the incorrect impression that some type of fraud is occurring. The consumer may erroneously contact the issuer to report the alleged fraud, only to learn that the transaction was legitimate and that a mistake had been made.
In other instances, the transaction information that is sent to the user may simply be incorrect. For example, the name of the merchant in the transaction notification may simply be incorrect or misspelled, due to a data error at a central server. If this information is incorrect, then the central server that provides such transaction information to the consumer and others may continue to provide incorrect information. It would be desirable if there was an efficient way to “clean” transaction data so that incorrect data in a payment processing system (or the like) is corrected in a timely manner so that subsequent transactions are conducted and reported with accuracy.
Embodiments of the invention address these and other problems, individually and collectively.